Contemporary Circus Education當代馬戲教育

ART.ZIP: Would you name some important companies and productions from the contemporary circus sector?

JE: There have been a lot of important companies and shows through the years, so I’ll just name a few artists that I like… In the UK, Gandini Juggling have been around for more than twenty years and they’re a really inventive group; they work with juggling, but their interests stretch in a lot of different directions and they’ve made shows inspired by visual art, haute couture fashion, Pina Bausch, ballet, and many other things. I think they’re planning to tour their show Smashed in China. There’s a French director called Aurélien Bory who I like a lot. He makes work that isn’t necessarily recognisable as circus, but he works with acrobats and is a juggler himself. One of his most famous shows is Sans Objet, which is a piece for two acrobats and one industrial robot – so on stage you have this huge machine that used to build cars on an assembly line. And then because I saw their show recently I’ll mention Sanja Kosonen and Elice Abonce Muhonen, two Finnish artists who decided to train hair hanging (an old traditional circus discipline) and then to make a full-length performance playing with how the audience responds to this quite gruesome sight of someone being suspended from their hair…